Not long after greeting the new millennium with what seemed like his crowning achievement of densely textured psychedelic popcraft, "The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone," The Apples in Stereos' Robert Schneider had a strange epiphany.

	Joshua Kessler After five years, The Apples in Stereo is bearing fruit with "New Magnetic Wonder." Click photo for larger image. The Apples in Stereo Where: Diesel, South Side. When: 7 p.m. Monday. Tickets: $12 advance; $14 at the door; 412-323-1919.

It happened, as epiphanies are wont to do, after washing down a batch of Memphis soul with an old Velvet Underground bootleg.

"All of a sudden it hit me," he says, "that what was really important about music was this sort of fire and soul, this sense of personality and meaning, and the fact that you could really feel the person making the music, that they were speaking directly to you. And although I had caught some fire on Apples records, I felt I had smothered it in all these overdubs, which just seemed really arbitrary all of the sudden. It's like on one day maybe I would have made horn parts, another day, maybe it would have been a fuzz guitar. And if these parts are interchangeable, then really, are they necessary at all?"

He'd become disillusioned, he says, with "big production and all the harmonies and horns, the psychedelic production I had worshiped my whole life, since I was a teenager. I felt like maybe what was most powerful and most meaningful about music was something that needed to be delivered very simply and in a very raw and pure way."

And so, for 2002's "Velocity of Sound," he turned his back on hi-fi pop-art and pulled out the 8-track he'd used on not only the Apples' first album but also seminal releases he'd cut for his Elephant Six collective friends Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel.

"I decided I want to make a record," he says, "that sounded like Phil Spector played through blown-out speakers."

While it definitely sounds like something played through blown-out speakers, it's actually closer in spirit to '60s garage-punk than a Spector record, a sound he would take to an even more stripped-down conclusion with his side band, Ulysses, recording live in his garage on just one microphone.

This new approach, he says, made Schneider very happy.

But when Brian Wilson finished "Smile," he had his next epiphany.

"It blew my mind with big production again," he raves. "And when I came back to that sound, I had a completely different feel for it. I still hold the same ideals about the vocal needing to have a lot of fire and humanity, but I felt like maybe it was incorrect to blame it on the big production. So I feel as though I learned what was important, and then I also learned how to meld it with what I think is beautiful. It's important to make a record you can listen to on headphones and it's absolutely tripped out. But it's also important to make a record you can listen to that really feels like somebody's talking to you."

With that in mind, he hit the studio and started work on "New Magnetic Wonder," the Apples' return to the '60s production values of "Discovery" after five long years without a new release.

He'd hesitate to call it five years off, though. After touring the band in support of "Velocity," he moved from Denver to Kentucky, got divorced, started Ulysses and another lo-fi side band, American Revolution, explored his love of mathematics using logarithms to devise a non-Pythagorean scale (which you can download to your keyboard or computer from this album), recorded a gem of electronic-flavored pop as Marbles, toured as Marbles and spent six months writing "New Magnetic Wonder." Schneider says he's written more songs in the past five years than in the previous 15. And in addition to the proper songs he wrote for "New Magnetic Wonder," he also recorded a series of link tracks, instrumental segues he hoped would serve as bridges between songs that didn't necessarily fit together.

"I always try really hard to make every song its own island," he says. "And it's like 'How do you connect the islands?' "

Which can be important when your album's highlights range from the towering 96-track wall of sound he built for 'Energy' to the dirtier lo-fi charms of "Skyway," a song that came to Schneider in a crazy yet meaningful dream he had about getting arrested and hearing "Skyway" on the police station radio -- only in his dream it was recorded by the Velvet Underground. At the opposite end of the rock 'n' roll spectrum, Schneider says the biggest inspiration on the way this record sounds was not the Velvet Underground or even "Smile" but ELO.

"OH MY GOD, they're so great!" Schneider gushes. "Jeff Lynne's such a genius. I wanted to give 'What a Drag' that '70s ELO kind of feel. That song is ELO on crack. It's ELO, but way more Paul McCartney, maybe more Nilsson. I was driving to Brooklyn, listening to ELO and on 'Sweet Talkin' Woman,' there's a break where the chorus drops out and it's just the vocoders basically. I was like 'Oh, my God, that's such a hip thing to do, to just drop it out for a couple extra measures at the end of the song.' So I decided I was gonna use that exact same thing at the exact same place in 'Same Old Drag.' It's such a good trick, in fact, that I decided I would do it on 'Can You Feel It?' Jeff Lynne only did it once. I did it twice."

He also unwittingly borrowed the chords to "Evil Woman" for the intro.

But even the obvious nods to Schneider's favorite records sound more like the Apples than anything, while nearly every track sounds like it could have been a hit at some point back when songs like this had any hope of being hits. And in the end, that makes this album pretty much exactly what he'd hoped it would be.

"After having this experience where I became disillusioned with pop music and then decided I loved it again," he says, "I had this feeling that the Apples were a band where all of our songs are strong, but I don't feel like all of our songs are total classic hits. We're more a band that if you're gonna recommend us to a friend you'd make a mix tape. So I decided I wanted to make a record that was the essential Apples record, where if someone were like, 'Hey, dude, can you recommend me an Apples record?,' you'd be like 'It's "New Magnetic Wonder," of course.' "